When the tracksuited drug dealer who'd been staring at her finally walked over to chat, Chloe decided to leave. As she turned to go, she spotted the detectives coming back out of the front doors.
'Hey, princess,' the man in the tracksuit stood in her path, his voice a nasal drawl. 'Do you want to go for a drink or something?'
'Actually,' she said, 'I've just got to catch up with my colleagues over there.' She saw the man clock the detectives. His eyes widened and he began to slink away. 'Maybe later,' she called after him. 'Could I get your name?'
Her would-be suitor broke into a jog, heading back down towards Speed Street.
Chloe smiled to herself and hurried to catch the cops ahead of her. She made a sudden decision that she'd approach them, identify herself and try to get some intel on the case. The worst they can do is brush me off, she thought. I've got to take risks if I'm going to get anywhere in this job.
She'd almost closed the distance between them when she noticed the male stop. The hairs rose on the back of her neck and she took the lens cap off her camera.
It all happened so quickly. Chloe had taken a dozen shots before she even knew what was happening. She got everything. The lot. This would run with the lead story tonight – she knew it. When she tied the two detectives to the taskforce and the murder in Capitol Hill, they'd link it all into one sensational story, with pictures.
I'm gonna get a lead reporter's job out of this home invasion story, thought Chloe, trying to run back to the news truck in her stupid new shoes. Hang in there, Mum and Dad.
14
ISOBEL FIGURED THAT if she could give Cutter to the police on a plate, Joss might be able to avoid having to tell his story to them. He'd always shied away from telling her much about his childhood, but she had known that he'd run with a gang until his grandparents had intervened. His account this morning of a robbery in which a boy called Fuzzy had been killed had been vaguely familiar to Isobel. However, the story she remembered hearing as a kid did not match what Joss had told her.
She remembered her parents talking about it after the evening news bulletin. It'd been a big story, back then. Late one night in 1984, fourteen-year-old Carl Waterman – affectionately known to all his classmates as 'Fuzzy' because of his blond afro – had investigated a noise in his father's bike shop. The shop sat underneath the two-bedroom apartment in North Parramatta that Carl shared with his father. Mr Waterman, waking to a crash, had found his son speared through the throat by a shard of glass from his shattered front window. He'd been unable to save his son. The man's desolate face on the news, pleading for the offenders to come forward, had brought Isobel's mother to tears. Her father had sworn that they should hang the bloody mongrels.
Actually, Joss had told her, what had really happened was that Fuzzy had let him, Cutter and Esterhase into the shop to steal the bikes. They figured insurance would pay for the robbery, and Mr Waterman would be no worse off. The plan was that they'd wheel a bike out each, and hide one for Fuzzy in the flats around the corner. It had gone perfectly until they shattered the window of the shop to make it look like a smash and grab. They knew Fuzzy's dad would sleep till the cops got there – he went to bed with Jack Daniels and nothing could wake him.
They were right. Mr Waterman didn't wake when the huge front window broke inwards and impaled his son. He didn't even wake when Cutter and Esterhase bolted from the shop, knocking over a rack of bike wheels.
Only Joss's screams had woken Fuzzy's dad from his drunken sleep. Joss had done his best to hold Fuzzy's throat together, but his best friend had drowned in his own blood right there in Joss's lap.
By the time he got downstairs carrying a baseball bat, Mr Waterman's son was dead, and Joss was gone.
15
THE CONDENSATION CAUSED by the spring rain combined with the steam of rice and soup cooking in the kitchen. Sweating, Cutter could imagine himself in the Vietnam of his grandfather's era. He rolled onto his side and reached for another tissue, coughed. The routines and rituals of the room comforted him back to his pillow. His aunt fed his cousin's baby on the floor next to him. His grandma sat in her favourite chair rolling sticky rice balls, just as she had every day of his life. He coughed again and groaned quietly, and his grandma glanced up, giving a cluck of alarm. His ma poked her head out from the doorway of the small kitchen and instructed him to drink more of the fish soup that was sitting in a bowl next to his mattress on the floor.
Cutter always came home when he was sick. He'd grown up in this humble house in Cabramatta, as had nine of his cousins and most of their children since. At times, there were up to twenty people sleeping in the house, and it had always been full of delicious smells, laughter and babies.
Because his father and grandfather had purchased the house together, young Henry was the only child to have a bedroom of his own. He would have preferred to sleep in this room with everyone else, on the mattresses that were rolled out each evening; but his grandfather had insisted that Henry occupy his own bed, telling him that he would one day inherit the home and should be aware of his place in the family.
Cutter had had great respect for his grandfather, who'd died when he was only eight, less than twelve months after Cutter's father had been hit by a car and killed instantly.
Cutter's grandfather had been a hero of the war in Vietnam, a general in the South Vietnamese army, fighting for the allies. At night, he had sat with Henry by the hour and verbally recreated epic battles, his role in fighting for the South. He'd prevented the deaths of hundreds of Australian and American troops, teaching them how to recognise and survive the perils of the steaming jungle. There were the panji pits: sticks and branches concealing a ditch studded with protruding spikes that had been poisoned with rotting meat. There were mines suspended from trees, created from discarded Western supplies, set at heights designed to pulverise half the face. He taught them to recognise signs in the bush that the enemy had passed or were waiting – bent leaves, a broken branch. He told Henry of the elaborate Cu Chi Tunnels, designed to house whole families as well as munitions, with deadly snakes kept ready to be released upon enemies brave enough to venture inside. The landmines in the hills of Long Hai; the perils of R amp;R in the streets of Saigon. Young Cutter, wide-eyed, sat on his bed with his chin on his knees, rapt, as his grandfather conjured up the tastes, smells and sounds of a country he had never visited.
Of course, the history lessons were not without pain. Henry understood that. One terrible night, betrayed by some of his own villagers, his grandfather had been captured by the Vietcong. Before he was rescued a week later when the Australians overran the camp, he had been tortured almost to death. Grandfather had watched each of his loyal troops beheaded one by one, their heads used as footballs by the enemy. When he'd closed his eyes, unable to watch, his eyelids were cut from his face. Grandpa told Henry that he knew his time would soon come when he had watched his lieutenant's manhood being cut from his loins and forced into his mouth, his lips then sewn crudely shut. He had watched his best friend's eyes pleading with him, the blood from his balls running from his mouth, before he too had been decapitated.
Grandpa told Henry that the experience had made him more than a man; he felt immortal. Death had no power over him. Pain held no fear. But the most powerful lesson, he told the boy almost every night, he had learned from the needles. It was his responsibility, he explained to his grandson, to teach him, to impart to him the same power.